Insect conservation in agricultural landscapes needs both high crop heterogeneity and semi-natural habitats

作者：Sara Tassoni, Dávid Becker, Marit Kinga Kasten, Jérôme Morinière, Ingo Graß · 发表于：Global Ecology and Conservation · 年份：2024 · DOI：10.1016/j.gecco.2024.e03218 · 被引用次数：7 · 研究领域：Plant and animal studies、Insect-Plant Interactions and Control、Ecology and Vegetation Dynamics Studies

Identifying landscapes that are suitable for both biodiversity conservation and agricultural production is a major challenge. Traditionally, much research has focused on biodiversity conservation outside of agricultural production areas, e.g., in semi-natural habitats. In contrast, recent research has mainly focused on the potential of crop heterogeneity. This includes both compositional (crop diversity) and configurational heterogeneity (field border density). However, if and how crop heterogeneity, and semi-natural habitats interact to shape insect diversity in agricultural landscapes remains poorly understood. Here we investigated the combined effects of crop diversity, field border density, and semi-natural habitats (i.e., grassland proportion, hedge density) on insect diversity. We sampled insect communities from 14 – 17 June 2021 with pan traps in 27 study landscapes (500 m x 500 m) covering independent gradients of these landscape variables and identified a total of 587 insect species with DNA metabarcoding. We found that field border density mediated the effects of crop diversity, grassland proportion, and hedge density on insect richness. At low levels of field border density (i.e., landscapes with mostly large fields), effects were either neutral (crop diversity), negative (grassland proportion) or weakly positive (hedge density). By contrast, at high levels of field border density, crop diversity, grassland proportion, and hedge density all exerted positive effects...